The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the Kalevala, in the world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun, the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously invented by the human mind. Yet these, together with the notions of the two halves of the shell of Brahma’s egg, and of the two calabashes which form the heaven and the earth in African myth, find their correspondences in the widespread conception of the over-arching firmament as a hard and solid thing,[11] with holes (or windows[12]) to let the rain through, with gates through which angels descend,[13] or through which prophets peer into celestial mysteries;[14] a firmament outside which other people live, as instanced by the. . . Read More